ReadWrite - solarishttp://readwrite.com/tag/solaris
enCopyright 2015 Wearable World Inc.http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rssTue, 31 Mar 2015 13:47:00 -0700Node.js Is Big, And Still Getting Bigger<!-- tml-version="2" --><p></p><div tml-image="ci01b278e410018266" tml-render-position="right" tml-render-size="small"><figure><img src="http://a1.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,w_620/MTIyMjkzMDU5NDY2NTg3NDE3.png" /></figure></div><p>Chances are if you think Walmart.com or LinkedIn is running smoothly, it’s thanks to Node.js, a server-side JavaScript development framework that is currently <a href="http://readwrite.com/2013/11/21/how-nodejs-got-big">powering everything from the biggest websites</a> to tiny microcontrollers.</p><blockquote tml-render-position="left" tml-render-size="medium"><p><strong>See also: <a href="http://readwrite.com/2013/11/07/what-you-need-to-know-about-nodejs">What You Need To Know About Node.js</a></strong></p></blockquote><p>Only a few years old, Node.js is quickly winning the hearts and minds of developers and the companies they work for. Shortly after&nbsp;<a href="http://readwrite.com/2013/09/19/api-defined">application programming interfaces</a> (APIs)—bits of code that let different software applications communicate—became popular and useful, companies sometimes found it sometimes difficult to manage them flexibly and to keep complex networks of applications working smoothly.</p><p>The result was frequent website crashes and breakdowns.&nbsp;While there are other options such as Erlang, Scala, Clojure and Go, so far, Node.js has been a very good at keeping APIs, and their related web services, up and running.</p><h2>Node.js Expands Its Territory</h2><p>To help extend its reach into more Internet server and cloud computing environments, Joyent this week <a href="http://www.joyent.com/blog/production-node-js-core-support-for-all">expanded its support for Node.js</a> to nearly every operating system and infrastructure framework broadly available.&nbsp;Already used on Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Windows, Node.js will now also work on Linux, Solaris, OmniOS, and its own operating system: SmartOS.</p><blockquote tml-render-position="right" tml-render-size="medium"><p><strong>See also: <a href="http://readwrite.com/2010/10/20/why-developers-should-pay-atte">Why Developers Should Pay Attention To Node.js</a></strong></p></blockquote><p>As Node.js usage grows, it's becoming a trusted component of load-bearing infrastructure. Companies like Walmart have made the switch to Node.js at the expense of other server-side frameworks such as Ruby on Rails.</p><p>“We have been approached by many corporate users who are rolling out production deployments at scale of Node.js,” vice president of product marketing Ben Wen <a href="http://www.joyent.com/blog/production-node-js-core-support-for-all">said in a blog post</a>. “Often they are interested in support for their deployments, which we can now provide in a variety of environments, in private data centers or even in clouds that are not our own.”</p><p>While Node.js is making the rounds and working wonders in some businesses, performance issues remain that require third-party software companies to adjust.</p><p>Eran Hammer of Walmart labs recently came to the Joyent Node.js core team complaining of a memory leak he had been tracking down for months, <a href="http://www.joyent.com/blog/node-summit-2013-bedtime-story">Wen explained in a separate post</a>. The source of the leak was identified as coming from Node.js just before the Black Friday shopping extravaganza. Though it took a few weeks, the source of the leak was finally identified by Joyent engineers, allowing Walmart to roll Node.js into production for Black Friday, processing 53% of all <a href="walmart.com">walmart.com</a> traffic.</p><p>At a time when retail sites are running around the clock to satisfy online shoppers, these types of improvements can mean the difference between a Black Friday and a blackout.</p><p><strong>Correction, Dec. 9</strong><em>An earlier version of the story incorrectly described the source of the memory leak at Walmart.</em></p>Joyent expands support for the popular development framework to nearly every server and cloud base.http://readwrite.com/2013/12/06/nodejs-os-infrastructure
http://readwrite.com/2013/12/06/nodejs-os-infrastructureWebFri, 06 Dec 2013 17:09:00 -0800Michael SingerJoyent Mashes Up Compute And Object Storage<!-- tml-version="2" --><p></p><div tml-image="ci01b282a6e0016d19" tml-render-position="right" tml-render-size="medium"><figure><img src="http://a3.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTIyMzAzNzkwNDQyNDQyMDA5.jpg" /></figure></div><p>If you think cutting edge of technology, chances are you are not going to be thinking about operating systems. Operating systems are, after all, the steady layer of software that sits on hardware and facilitates things getting done. Some operating systems are steadfast and steady (Linux), some are flashy and fun (OS X) and some are a little crazy (Windows), but they all get the job done. What more is there to do?</p><p>But innovation at the operating system level is not dead yet, if <a href="http://joyent.com/">Joyent</a> has anything to say about it. The cloud infrastructure has just announced the availability of a new cloud object store and data services platform that demonstrates that operating systems still have some serious technological chops.</p><p>The idea of the <a href="http://joyent.com/products/manta">Manta Storage Service</a>, is to make use of a type of virtualization that differs from what is typically seen in the marketplace. This is what is known as hardware virtualization, where platforms like VMware, Xen and KVM emulate an entire server - the hardware - so that apps will run on top of the guest operating system, which in turn runs on top of the hypervisor (the "machine" in virtual machine).</p><p>Joyent's approach uses virtualization at the operating system level, explained Bryan Cantrill, VP of Engineering at Joyent. This means that such instances have to run the same operating system that's being used on the physical host machine, but the tradeoff is worth it, Cantrill emphasized. With operating systems virtualized, apps can be run exactly where the data is sitting within an object store - a much more direct process.</p><p>Cantrill used the market behemoth Amazon Web Services to explain the difference in data access.</p><p>In Cantrill's example, log files are stored in S3 - a common use for Amazon's object storage service. To look for error in these S3-stored log files, one could run grep, a UNIX application used to search and discover contents of files. But you can't run grep (or any other application) in S3, because S3 just stores. So you would have to "backhaul the data into Hadoop and run a query for errors there," Cantrill said, or move the log file data into Amazon's EC2 and then run grep.</p><p>Moving data around like that takes time. Using OS-virtualization, though, means that apps can be run at the same location of the data. That is the core premise of Manta, spinning up OS instances as needed to run applications to search and manipulate data where it resides.</p><p>"The code is smaller than the data, so it makes more sense to bring the code to the data," Cantrill said.</p><p>"People can even run checksums on backups for compliance," he added - an operation that would involve data migration using S3 and other object storage systems.</p><p></p><p><em>Image courtesy of <a href="http://www.shutterstock.com">Shutterstock</a>.</em></p>Using object storage? Always moving data to work on it? There may be a better way.http://readwrite.com/2013/06/25/joyent-mashes-up-compute-and-object-storage
http://readwrite.com/2013/06/25/joyent-mashes-up-compute-and-object-storageCloudTue, 25 Jun 2013 08:02:00 -0700Brian Proffitt